Alien: Covenant is both a prequel and a sequel. It’s a sequel to the execrable film Prometheus, which was the best screenwriting example ever seen where the plot only moves forward only because every character makes a series of unbelievably stupid decisions. It’s also a prequel, because it continues the story of how the alien from the eponymous Alien science fiction movie franchise got its genetic start.

Despite this, it’s an entertaining movie, the greater son of a lesser father. Michael Fassbender puts in his usual terrific performance, investing the dual roles of androids named David and Walter with both credibility and pathos. Billy Crudup as the unready, less-than-assertive captain of the deep-space colonization vehicle Covenant makes you believe beyond a shadow of doubt that his character couldn’t do a whole lot right if his and his crew’s lives depended on it, which is a more difficult role than you might think. Everyone else fills their trope-positions admirably, so not much else to say there.

The mythology behind the story and the character motivations all made a certain amount of tragic, disturbing sense, and the mysteries that the captain and his crew seek to unravel are compelling; you want to see what happens next and what’s going to happen afterward. There are some dumb parts, but not many. You like science fiction? You like the Alien franchise? You like blood and monsters? Take a look at Alien: Covenant.

I saw a lot of online praise for Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage as a man who gets revenge on the religious cult that murdered his wife. While the film was, for the most part, a fun watch, I’m surprised at how many plaudits it got. The story’s as pedestrian as they come; in fact, I can’t believe it hasn’t been protested out of circulation for use of the “they killed my wife so I’m going to kill them” trope. Most movie reviewers are male feminists (heh): aren’t they horribly offended by this movie? Where’s the woke backlash?

Much has been made of Cage’s excellent portrayal of Red, the protagonist, which is also strange: Nicolas Cage is great in every movie he’s in. Sure, he’s been in some terrible movies, but they’re not terrible because of him. He elevates them to watchable status simply because of his performance. Who’s more entertaining on screen than Nic Cage? Nobody. He’s both character actor and leading man in one package.

If you plan to watch Mandy I hope you like magenta, because you’ll be seeing quite a lot of it. It’s the director’s favorite filter. The film starts off extremely slowly, so much so that my wife fell asleep during the first forty minutes in and had to be nudged awake to see Cage get strung up with barbed wire. At that point it moves briskly enough, but I kept waiting for it to get to the really good part.

It didn’t. Still, it was decent, and I liked it. There’s enough blood and guts and dumb violence to get your motor running, if that’s indeed the thing that turns the ignition for you. And some funny parts. And a lot of weirdness.

The Cheddar Goblins commercial wasn’t as incredibly amazing as touted, but it was funny enough and did what it was supposed to do, more or less.

Over three years ago I reviewed Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which purported to tell the story of the Biblical Noah. It was not a good movie, nor was it consistent with Biblical tradition. But I did kind of like it because it was a fun, if stupid way to spend some time.

Aronofsky’s second Biblical movie, Mother!, is a horrible, unwatchable mess from beginning to end, the kind of film that should end Aronofsky’s career the way Heaven’s Gate did to Michael Cimino. But because we live in a time where virtue-signaling and pleasing the right critics is far more important than decent filmmaking or entertaining an audience, we’ll no doubt be treated to yet another Aronofsky movie in the future. Maybe it’ll be better than Mother!.

It would have to be.

The movie metaphorically retells the Bible in around 120 minutes, though the runtime feels more like 120 days. It stars Javier Bardem, one of the few anti-Semites that Hollywood hasn’t run out of town yet, and Jennifer Lawrence, who thinks that hurricanes are the planet’s way of punishing people for voting for Trump. Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are also in it, which is a shame because they’re both great to watch, but wasted in this bilge. Lawrence spends the entire film sporting the same bovine, open-mouthed mien that’s intended to express everything from shock to horror to sadness to joy, depending on the stimulus. She’s the titular Mother: Mother Earth. Bardem is supposed to be God. I’m sure he thinks he’s apt enough to play the role.

The exclamation point at the end of the title represents the chaos of the last quarter of the film. Just so you know.

Reasonable people often disagree about Biblical exegesis, but this is an interpretation of the Bible as told by the wokest Environmental Science associate professor who ever shared a spliff in the quad. It’s really not at all worth watching, not even as a curiosity.

To 80’s film fans, [Michael] Paré needs no introduction: Eddie and the Cruisers, Streets of Fire, The Philadelphia Experiment. In the role of Thomas, a homeless alcoholic, he brings his characteristic deep-throated mumble, but also shows a broad, affecting range of self-loathing and opportunism. As pretty much the only character in the movie, he lifts the rather weak story to heights it wouldn’t have reached with any other actor.

Does Michael Paré save this film, or does it sink under its own portentous weight? Click to find out!

There’s quite a bit of good stuff that’s happened this week in the world of the weird, the horrific, the speculative. As always, drop me a line if you’d like to be included in next week’s Friday Links, but for now, here’s the 411 on the bizarre:

At Nev Murray’s Confessions of a Reviewer!!, writer Pembroke Sinclair confessed her past, present, and future: “My current reading list is a bit more eclectic than it used to be when I was younger. When I went to college, rarely did I have time to read for enjoyment, but as an English major, I was exposed to the classics. And I loved the vast majority of them. Every so often, I will pull Alice in Wonderland off the shelf and reread it. Milton’s Paradise Lost helped shape the themes I explore in my own stories, and I am forever grateful to my professors for helping me learn to look at the world critically.”

The ghost of Winston Churchill is apparently haunting the London Underground: “‘I’m a big believer in stuff like this but I have never ever seen anything like this before.’ The photograph, which was taken last summer, has since been showed to a number of mediums and ghost hunters, with many agreeing with Mr Cooper. The coach driver said: ‘I have since heard stories about people who have seen the ghost of Churchill down there.”

Ruined Head reviewed the horror/action video game Darkest Dungeon: “The twist here is that the characters suffer mental as well as physical damage, picking up a variety of afflictions—described as Paranoid, Selfish, Abusive, Masochistic—that impact gameplay, requiring a variety of treatments back on the surface. Sometimes, if the stress level becomes high enough, characters simply die of a heart attack before being able to retreat from battle.”

A pressbook from the 1952 Buster Crabbe film King of the Congo fell out of Zombos’ Closet. It includes a coloring sheet for the little ones, so it’s not to be missed.

Things went from bad to worse at the trenchant, incisive R’lyeh Tribune when Sean Eaton analyzed Thomas Ligotti’s The Town Manager: “In The Town Manager the work of this appointed official seems pointless and inconsequential. He and his predecessors are typically seen napping at their desks. Why should his disappearance cause much alarm? What does the town manager actually do? What does it mean for the town to lose its town manager, or be given a new one? And yet the town manager appears to have nearly god-like power.”

Vintage Everyday brought us 25 photos of vintage costumes that are simply…inexplicable.

John Kenneth Muir, a master at deconstructing old, supposedly bad films and rehabilitating them, defended Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: “The “nuke the fridge” moment in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is absolutely no more ludicrous than that inflatable raft scene in Temple of Doom. Yet audience tastes have changed dramatically, and modern audiences don’t buy the “nuke the fridge” set-piece in the way that viewers in 1984 accepted the raft cliffhanger. Nor do they buy “aliens” in an adventure film, or a geriatric hero defeating bad guys. “Realism” is not served by these creative choices, and so these choices are, widely in some cases, derided.”

Bryan Stumpf interviewed writer/director David Munz-Maire at The Slaughtered Bird: “Born to expats, my formative years were spent living around our globe, and I find myself extremely fortunate to have been able to sample dozens of cultures through this cosmopolitan upbringing. The communal aspect of the filmmaking is one of my favorite parts of the business, and my worldly perspective has allowed me to be better adept at working with people from all walks of life, more open minded when confronted with new ideas, and generally more inventive when tackling creative problem solving.”

You do wear your seat belt whenever you’re in a car, right? Well, if you don’t, this Supergirl comic book from Jon’s Random Acts of Geekery will convince you otherwise.

Can you believe that it’s been 35 years since the movie Porky’s was made? The House of Self-Indulgence can, and it brought us the highlights: “In fact, the film’s two funniest scenes both involve Doug McGrath failing miserably when it came to stifling his laughter. The first one, like I’ve already mentioned, involves him trying not to laugh when he hears Kim Cattrall being screwed upstairs. And the second one has him unsuccessfully trying not to laugh as he listens to Miss Balbricker (Nancy Parsons) explain to the school’s prudish principal that she wants put out an all-points bulletin for the teenage boy-penis she saw (and grabbed onto for a spell) in the girl’s shower.”

Father Cipriano de Meo, a longtime exorcist, told us how to tell if someone has been demonically possessed: “The key to telling the difference, he said, is through discernment in prayer on the part of the exorcist and the possessed – and in the potentially possessed person’s reaction to the exorcist himself and the prayers being said. The exorcist will typically say “(a) prolonged prayer to the point where if the Adversary is present, there’s a reaction,” he said. “A possessed person has various general attitudes towards an exorcist, who is seen by the Adversary as an enemy ready to fight him.””

In honor of yesterday’s celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, Ghost Hunting Theories did an overview of forgotten races of little people: “Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “Hobbit,” was found in Jakarta, Indonesia and aged at about 17,000 years ago. His brain was the size of a chimp, his body 3 feet long, but his feet strangely long and flat at 7-1/2 inches. The assumption by his very flat feet is that he was unable to run like we do, but could walk. In fact, though he was a hominin, he did not seem to have feet that were anything like our own evolutionary process.”

Taliesin Meets the Vampires reviewed the segment of the 1964 Japanese movie Kwaidan titled, The Woman of the Snow: “This was a beautifully shot segment, the painted backdrops during the snow storm segment was nothing short of gorgeous and added an eerie, overworldly aspect to the scene.”

Nev Murray made an open call for confessors at his invaluable Confessions of a Reviewer!!: “If you are an author and would like to take part in [Confessions of My Past, Present, and Future], then please see the guidelines for it below and email me at confessionsofareviewer@gmail.com to let me know. Also, for the first time ever, I am throwing the floor open to ANY of you who would like to take part. Yup, that’s right, you don’t have to be a published author to send a submission in for this. If you love books and reading and always have and always will, I want to hear from you.”

In Tablet, we learned a bit about demonology in the Talmud: “And how did Solomon get his hands on the shamir? We learn from the Gemara that he did so by kidnapping Ashmedai: Solomon tricked the demon into drinking wine, and when he got drunk the king subdued him with a magic chain that bore the name of God.”

The pressbook for the 1935 film The Roaring West fell out of Zombos’ Closet.

Ruined Head reviewed the 1969 novel Satan’s Coast: “A tepid thriller, Satan’s Coast distinguishes itself from other genre entries through its heroine’s self-awareness of conventions [or maybe she’s just a good detective rather than an avid reader of romance paperbacks]. After witnessing a few mysterious lights and a boat offshore, Nell immediately deduces what, in other Gothic romances, is often revealed in the denouement as the source of mysterious doings in similar old castle locations—namely, a smuggling operation.”

At his incisively interesting R’lyeh Tribune, Sean Eaton brought his excellent series on the theme of basements in Lovecraftian-era horror to a close with an analysis of the subway as an urban basement: “But the revelation that “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers” are active beneath the streets of New York—reported in the first few paragraphs of the story—is not the primary horror in Far Below. The ghouls were evidently present even before the arrival of white men on Manhattan, and their history is intermingled with that of the great city, with disturbing incidents sprinkled throughout legend and folklore—“Even some of Washington Irving’s writings have a nasty twist to them, if you once realize it!””

A haunted Bible was recently put on eBay: “An antique Bible that is believed to be possessed by spirits that pulled a woman down the stairs has been put up for sale on eBay. The Bible has been listed on the auction site by a man, named only as Fred, who keeps it in an empty room in a church because he is so fearful of the bad luck the book might bring in to his home.”

LastBoneStands reviewed the 2014 Bigfoot movie Stomping Ground at The Slaughtered Bird: “The story relies on the tension that builds up between the characters. Ben is a fish out of water, his only lifeline being Annie. He doesn’t know the area or the people, and certainly knows nothing of hiking and camping in the backwoods of North Carolina. Ben is also a skeptic where Bigfoot is concerned, often mocking the others for their belief, and at times becoming frustrated that he seems to be the only one that doesn’t think the creature exists.”

Scott at AnythingHorror gave us a list of his favorite witch-themed horror films.

Cool Ass Cinema brought us Japan’s answer to Moby Dick: “Daiei Studios had enjoyed international recognition in the 1950s with award-winning pictures such as Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950), but it was the company’s 1960s output that is easily their most popular. Wedged in between Art House films, tense samurai epics and entertaining monster movies are a few pictures that combined all three of those styles; WHALE GOD is one such production.”

Here, I interviewed author and youth pastor Valicity Garris, and described the experience of being kicked off the staff of Ginger Nuts of Horror for expressing, in my own space, opinions that millions and millions and millions of other people share.*